1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a control method and an application program for controlling a digital mixer engine which processes an audio signal.
2. Related Art
A digital mixer is known that may be customized in mixer configuration as described in non patent document “DIGITAL MIXING ENGINE DME32 INSTRUCTION MANUAL”, YAMAHA CORPORATION, 2001. With this digital mixer, its sound signal processing block is configured by a processor (a digital signal processor (DSP) for example) that is operational as instructed by programs so as to process sound signals on the basis of a mixer configuration (or a signal processing configuration) created and edited by use of an external PC (Personal Computer). The mixer configuration creating and editing operations on the PC are executed by use of a dedicated mixer control program. To be more specific, the mixer control program is operated on the PC to display a mixer editing screen. On the screen, components (or configuration elements) providing parts for signal processing are arranged, and the arranged components are interconnected to specify input/output relationships, thereby creating and editing a desired mixer configuration. The created mixer configuration is transmitted to the digital mixer for execution, thereby allowing the digital mixer to realize an operation of the created mixer configuration.
The above-mentioned components include a preset component (hereafter referred to as a P component) and a custom component (hereafter referred to as a C component). The P component provides a basic unit of mixer configuration components. The C component is a combination of a plurality of P components. The C component may be created and edited as desired by a user given a predetermined authority.
A mixer control program allows the definition of a user authority of each user who uses that mixer control program and the definition of a setting scope in which a mixer configuration may be set for each user authority. Normally, a specific user name (for example, Administrator) of top administration authority is determined in advance, so that each user who purchased a mixer engine logs on the mixer control program with that user name for user registration and sets the user authority of each user as desired.
On the other hand, vendors are known that create and sell mixer configurations and parameters thereof. However, these mixer configurations and parameters are all seen through if a user gives the top user authority to his own user name, thereby making it difficult to protect these configurations and parameters as know-how. The same holds when a vendors creates and sells C components. Each user may see through the configurations and parameters of these C components as desired. Vendors sometimes want to hide the entirety of each configuration and the details of parameters of their products away from the user.